TBCS P4 - Mixing Fundamentals | Olawale Omosekeji

Welcome to Part 4 of The Basics of Church Sound.

Up until now, we’ve been laying foundations.

In Part 1, we took a high-level view of sound and talked about your responsibility as a sound engineer in church. In Part 2, we focused on hardware and signal flow — the equipment you’ll commonly see, how they connect to each other, and how audio moves from the source to the speakers. In Part 3, we talked about cables, connectors, DI boxes, balanced and unbalanced signals, and how we actually get sound into the mixer cleanly.

At this point, you now have sound sources connected to your mixer. Signals are coming in. You can see meters moving. Sound is coming out of the speakers.

Now the real question is: what do you do with that sound?

That brings us to mixing.

But before we talk about gain staging, EQ, compression, or balancing levels, there is something far more important we need to address first — something many people skip.

We need to talk about hearing and listening.

Resources:

Introduction, Audio Production and Critical Listening by Jason Corey Read Chapter 1. If you've read it before, read it again, and again, and again!
Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio | Mike Senior Read the entire Part 1 of the book. If you've read it before, guess what? Read it again 😄
How to train your ears | Audio University
Decibels (dB) in Audio | Audio University
The decibel | Sound Reinforcement Handbook For Yahama by Gary Davis & Ralph Jones Read chapter 1, 2 and 3 like 500 times 🙂

Mixing: science and art

Sound engineering, and mixing in particular, has two sides: a scientific side and an artistic side.

The scientific side is the part most people are familiar with. It’s knowing your tools. You know what an EQ does. You know what compression is. You know what a reverb is used for. You understand, at least theoretically, that kick drums live on the low end, vocals sit around the mids, cymbals are brighter, and so on. You know frequency ranges. You know what each tool is meant to do.

That knowledge is important. Very important.

But knowing tools alone does not make you a good mixing engineer.

The artistic side is where things really change. This is where you take the tools you already know and decide when, why, and how to use them. Two engineers can have the same theoretical knowledge of EQ and still EQ the same vocal completely differently — and both can be correct.

A good way to think about it is painting. Every painter knows colors. They know brushes. They know canvases. But if you give ten painters the same subject to paint, you’ll get ten very different results. Not because they don’t know the tools, but because they apply what they know differently.

Mixing works the same way.

The bridge between the science and the art of mixing is your ability to hear.

Before you touch a tool, you must hear a problem

Every tool in sound engineering exists to solve a problem.

EQ solves tonal problems.
Compression solves dynamic problems.
Reverb and delay solve space and depth problems.

But here’s the issue: if you cannot clearly hear the problem, you won’t know which tool to reach for — or how to use it properly.

Before you boost a frequency, you should already know why you’re boosting it.
Before you cut something, you should already know what you’re trying to remove.
Before you compress, you should already know what is wrong with the dynamics.

So the first question you must always answer is simple:

What am I hearing?

Is the track good or bad?
If it’s bad, what exactly is bad about it?

If the tone doesn’t sound good, what does that mean? Is it too dull? Is it too bright? Is it muddy? Is it boxy? Is it harsh?

And when you say “muddy” or “harsh,” what do you actually mean by that?

The better you can describe the problem, the easier it becomes to solve it.

Hearing vs listening

This is where the difference between hearing and listening comes in.

Everyone hears sound. Anyone can enjoy music. Anyone can dance to a song in church.

But as a sound engineer, that’s not enough.

Hearing is passive.
Listening is intentional.

When you listen, you’re not just enjoying the sound — you’re analyzing it. You’re asking questions while the sound is happening.

What am I listening to right now?
What is standing out too much?
What is getting lost?
Are the instruments fighting each other?
Is the vocal communicating the emotion clearly?
Does this mix feel tight, or does it feel messy?

Even if something is at the “right level,” you still have to ask: does it sound right for this song, in this room, with these people?

That level of attention is what separates hearing from listening.

Your ears are your greatest asset

As a sound engineer, your greatest asset is not the mixer, the plugins, or the speakers.

It’s your ears.

You can know every tool in the world, but if you cannot hear the problem the tool is meant to solve, you won’t even know when to use it. And if you don’t know when to use it, you’ll either use the wrong tool or use the right tool for the wrong reason.

Many people can tell you that a mix sounds bad. Very few can tell you why it sounds bad.

Your responsibility as a sound engineer is to take it further. You should be able to say, “This doesn’t sound good, and this is exactly what is wrong with it — and this is what needs to be done.”

That ability starts with listening.

Training your ears

Hearing well is not something you’re born with as a sound engineer. It’s something you train.

Just like a boxer trains every day, or a footballer trains every day, you must train your ears consistently. The moment you stop training is the moment you stop growing.

Ear training is a lifelong process. I’m still training my ears. Nobody ever truly finishes learning how to hear better.

One major way you train your ears is by listening to music intentionally.

Whenever you mix, you are always referencing something, whether you realize it or not. Your idea of what sounds “good” is shaped by music you’ve already heard — professionally produced songs, worship music on streaming platforms, live recordings you admire.

So listen.

Take a song you love and study it. Compare it to what you’re mixing. What is in that track that isn’t in yours? What is in yours that shouldn’t be there? How loud is the vocal relative to everything else? How much low end is present? How wide does it feel? How much space does the reverb create?

Study the relationships between instruments. Study tone, dynamics, and space. Notice how different reverbs create different emotions. Notice how compression changes the feel of a performance.

You don’t need to know every piece of software in the world. You need to know how things sound.

Why this matters before we start mixing

I’m spending this much time on hearing and listening because none of the mixing techniques we’re about to talk about will make sense without it.

Before you touch a fader, you must train your ears.
Before you adjust EQ, you must hear what needs fixing.
Before you compress, you must understand what’s happening dynamically.

Mixing starts in your ears long before it reaches your hands.

In the next part of this series, we’ll begin to talk about practical mixing topics like gain staging and volume balancing. We were supposed to touch on meters and decibels in this chapters, but I won't explain them here. I've attached videos above so you can learn from there properly.

Thank you for sticking around, and I hope this part helps you listen — not just hear — a little better. I'll see you in the next one.